In Living Worth Stefan Ecks draws on ethnographic research on depression and antidepressant usage in India to develop a new theory of value. Framing depressive disorder as a problem of value, Ecks traces the myriad ways antidepressants come to have value, from their ability to help make one’s life worth living to the wealth they generate in the multibillion-dollar global pharmaceutical market. Through case studies that include analyses of the different valuation of generic and brand-name drugs, the origins of rising worldwide depression rates, and the marketing, prescription, and circulation of antidepressants, Ecks theorizes value as a process of biocommensuration. Biocommensurations—transactions that aim or claim to make life better—are those forms of social, medical, and corporate actions that allow value to be measured, exchanged, substituted, and redistributed. Ecks’s theory expands value beyond both a Marxist labor theory of value and a free market subjective theory, thereby offering new insights into how the value of lives and things become entangled under neoliberal capitalism.

Stefan Ecks is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and author of Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India.

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. Embodied Value Theory  11
2. Relative Value: Culture, Comparison, Commensurability  36
3. Never Enough: Markets in Life  57
4. Making a Difference: Corporate Social Responsibility  79
5. Pharmaceutical Citizenship, Marketing, and the Global Monoculture of Health  98
6. What Drugs Do in Different Spaces: Global Spread and Local Bubbles  117
7. Acting through Other (Prescribing) Habits  136
8. Culture, Context, and Consensus: Comparing Symptoms and Things  156
9. Generic: Distinguishing Good Similarity from Bad Similarity  175
10. Same Ills, Same Pills: Genealogies of Global Mental Health  194
11. Failed Biocommensurations: Psychiatric Crises after DSM-5  214
References  235
Index  269